


There Must Be a Glimpse of Hope in Sight

by BlessedAreTheFandoms



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: A Stitch in Time - Andrew Robinson, Alien Biology, Cardassian Anatomy, Cardassian Culture, Challenge Response, Developing Relationship, Enabran Tain's A+ Parenting, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, More Tags Than Words, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Self-Harm, This covers a lot of ground for such a short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29063139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlessedAreTheFandoms/pseuds/BlessedAreTheFandoms
Summary: A series of short vignettes charting Elim Garak's understanding of himself as a person anchored in the moments he, a Cardassian, has to shed his scales.(Written for the Just in Time Fest)
Relationships: Elim Garak/Palandine, Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Comments: 19
Kudos: 64
Collections: Star Trek: Just in Time Fest





	There Must Be a Glimpse of Hope in Sight

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Midnight Dove](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCRSZ-Ybqg0) by Shawn James.

The first time Elim Garak had his full-body scale shed, Tolan showed him how to make sure the smaller scales along his wrists and throat could be wiggled out so they didn’t tear. Mila showed him how a hot cloth could help the binding of his own body loosen, a gentle release of what was dead to make way for life. In his strange but deep devotion to the gods no one named, Tolan taught him a short ritual of reverence for the last scale, thanking the gods for the newly protected body, replenished and healthy.

Tain made sure to clap him on the back in congratulations, right on the spot where the new scales were most tender, where Elim’s own biology made him most vulnerable. Tain always liked to use pain as a teacher. Elim did not wince, and he did not forget.

***

The second time he bedded Palandine, Garak’s shedding cycle caught up to them. Her hard scales scraped across his dying ones and she helped him with the places he could not reach, gently breathing on the newly-uncovered skin. It did not hurt and Garak remembered Tain’s lesson about vulnerability, forgot it deliberately as she dragged her body down all the soft places, an electric jolt of sensuality unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He thanked his new body as Tolan had once taught him, grateful for the ability to feel, to rock his delicate skin against Palandine’s abrasive love. His mind folded under the intensity of it as her fingers flicked away the last of the old, the dying, welcoming the hardening scales with eager ministrations. He wondered if it could be like this, this being reborn under skillful fingers, this allowance of two dangerous people being safe for each other in one breath, two silenced cries of fierce release, glorying in the sensation of being alive still.

***

Three days after the Federation came to Terok Nor and renamed it Deep Space Nine, Garak met a young human doctor whose smile was impossibly big and his fear improbably small. He leaned into the curiosity of the man, into the beauty of his alien leanness, the way those limbs went on for meters. The mind was every bit as beautiful as the body and when his shedding came Garak hid his discomfort, not wanting the ready blanket of compassion the doctor had for one and all. Garak watched his body change while his circumstances stayed exactly the same, the distance from Cardassia etched into him with the loss of every scale that had felt Prime’s breezes, the gain of every new patch that had only known recycled station air. Each night he shook the loose scales out of his clothing; at lunch with the doctor he hid how much the skin itched, how much he wondered what that smooth body would feel like against these vulnerable places, whether those long fingers could excite the same kind of electricity as Palandine’s attentions had. 

He stopped thinking about Palandine, and Cardassia’s breezes, and remembered a hand coming down on his shoulder, Tain’s dark eyes watching to make sure the message was sent, received.

The doctor asked him if he was well and he said he was fine because he always said he was fine, and when he forgot Tolan’s teachings of patience and Mila’s reminders of heat and ripped out the scales on his bicep in his haste to get rid of the dead to laugh at the idea of living here, the blood running down his arm was hardly worth mentioning in the grand scheme of everything that was wrong.

***

In his fourth year of friendship with Dr. Bashir, the man knew something was wrong—after all, Tain had given him medical records, Garak had given him stories, even Dukat had given him a Cardassian body to examine. Bashir knew about the shedding cycle, knew how miserable an experience it was not to be able to push off the whole of the skin in one go like a snake but to have to patiently wait for it to fall away, the new armor stretching into the opened space. He offered to help because Bashir was always offering to help, the doctor with the too-earnest face and the too-open heart, and Garak had long since lost the ability to say no to him. The heat of the human’s hands was incredible, the soft skin even more wonderful than Garak had imagined, and it took everything in Garak’s considerable training and that first memory of Tain’s hand’s unerring aim where it would hurt the most to keep him from turning into that lithe body and taking friendship into something else entirely.

Dr. Bashir said he was only too happy to help, and Garak laughed at himself for thinking that there had been a glimpse of hope in his hazel eyes that such an opportunity could become something else.

***

By the fifth dead end where even Kira’s sharp sense of danger could not keep them safe, Garak knew that his Cardassia would not survive this war without considerable cost—and that, most likely, _he_ would not survive it at all. In the basement of Tain’s house, a fitting crown to the shattered glory of Tain’s memory, Mila brought a tray of hot cloths, knowing the signs of Garak’s impending shed even after all these years. Garak thanked her, cursing the timing that it had to be here, that it had to be now that his own body would make him vulnerable, the metaphor fittingly terrible of his scales falling off while his world fell apart, his body renewing itself while the planet that had birthed him died. 

While the mother that had birthed him died.

Damar helped him to get the last of the scales, understanding that asking Kira was the one line that could not be crossed, sharing this most Cardassian of gestures before running headlong into the foolishness of redefining Cardassia itself. As the hope of a new Cardassia died in front of him, Garak felt his clothing slide across the new skin still hardening and wondered if he would live to see the scales forming on the body that never seemed to die.

***

It had been six months since he had sent the long letter to Dr. Bashir, to _Julian_ , the blatant attempt to see what could be salvaged from a galaxy determined to show Garak just how much there was to be lost. Cardassia had started slowly, achingly slowly, to come back to life, glimpses of hope beginning to stir as the dust began to settle and building could be about culture and planning rather than survival. Cardassia could come back—but Julian would not, Julian who was beautiful and kind and broken by a war that did not care about beauty or kindness. When the shedding came, Garak remembered Tolan’s careful tugging and Tain’s hearty slap and he tore the scales out mindfully, breathing in the pain, bleeding on the floor of the little house he had made for himself on the ruins of his father’s ambition and his mother’s grave, refusing to give himself any kind of comfort or healing because the doctor had all the kindness and Garak had never learned to have any for himself.

***

After seven years, Garak no longer thought about what a Starfleet doctor could be doing with his time; Garak was far too busy leading Cardassia, teaching it how to protect itself without tearing the heart out of everything else. The papers on his desk overlapped each other like the scales that were just about to begin falling out and he was startled by the poetic comparison, so unlike his usual pragmatism. It had been a long day meeting with the Federation and their veiled hints at a joining he had no intention of pursuing, a day of so much prose and clumsily veiled doublespeak that he longed for poetry, for imagery that invited deep consideration and a view of what couldn’t be seen. When his assistant told him that a human had arrived and pled to be able to see him, he wondered which part of the ambassadorial contingent was trying to get at him now.

The last thing he expected was the willowy doctor, still so beautiful, the smile even bigger and the fear slightly smaller. Garak covered for his speechlessness and asked what on Prime could bring the doctor out this way, to his office; Bashir asked Garak to call him Julian, spoke of a letter and a lifetime, apologized for how much time flowed between them, said that he wanted more and oh, Garak had always wanted to give him everything.

“It should be about shedding time for you, Elim,” Julian said shyly, his long fingers full of an entirely possible life. “Would you like some help with your scales?”

**Author's Note:**

> I really, really love fics having to do with Cardassian scales and how that would work and how a shed would affect their relationships with each other and with aliens. There are plenty of good tales on here exploring that, but Skepticamoeba's [let us be trivial, let us be intimate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21878809/chapters/52221598?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false) kicked off a whole outline for this in one sitting in my mind, so that gets credit as one you definitely should read.


End file.
